As you can see, “low-effort thinking” promotes conservative responses and ideation, even in liberals. Booze helped too. They gave subjects booze to drink, and the drunker they got, the more conservative their responses tended to be. This was true even in liberals. It’s well known that booze makes you stupid the more of it you drink.

It also suggests that conservatism is the default ideology in man, since our quickest and least thought out opinions are likely to be conservative. Which is why mankind wallowed under monarchism, feudalism, slavery, neofeudalism, fascism, rightwing dictatorships and now neoliberalism other forms of the rule of the richest and tiniest elites for so long. People weren’t thinking much, so their default response was just to accept these most backwards, primitive and brutal ways of living.

The only way people get to be liberals or progressives is if they actually start thinking about things a little bit. Since this is not the human tendency, we will always fight rearguard battles against ill-thought out philosophies like conservatism.

10 responses to “The Less You Think, the More Conservative You Are”

They needed a scientific study for this? I’ve always thought that conservatism was the result of low wattage thinking. It seems based primarily upon greed, fear, and xenophobia. Don’t certain scientists refer to that as the reptilian brain?
That isn’t to say that these reactions are necessarily unsound. Sometimes I think that many of the more PC liberals are perhaps a little too smart, thoughtful, or evolved for their own good. These traits may have become liabilities for individual or collective survival in some cases. Perhaps that’s another reason there are so many more conservatives.

I am pretty damn (social) liberal but I don’t think liberals should pat themselves on the back for this study. You can also interpret it as showing that most liberals are fakes: they’re reflexively racist or homophobic or whatever but when given time to think about how to answer, they know how to construct cleaned up, PC replies.

Not only that, but thinking is really overrated. Half of the time the first intuitive idea you come up with is the best and then you screw yourself out of some opportunity by trying to think on it. I trust my intuition a lot more than the rationalizations that I come up with conscious thinking.

I support Liberal Race Realism. One of our arguments is that liberals are not conservatives on race deep down inside. Sure your first judgement is to be a racist asshole or whatever. But liberals are people who have done the hard work in order to transcend their idiotic limbic responses. It’s not that liberals are fakes. It’s that they stop and catch their racism and correct it. They recognize that it’s wrong, and strive to move beyond to become a New Man, a New Socialist Man, or whatever. Sure it’s all about social engineering. People are not naturally ok. Apparently they are naturally reactionary fucks. Takes a lot of hard work to move beyond being a Peronist brownshirt man of the streets. You have to actually think for once.

Instead of being fakes, liberals are simply those of us who have thought ourselves into a more intelligent and moral place. We are no longer animals, and we are proud of this as we ought to be.

I think all your classifications are too broad to be useful. For example, you’re a critical thinker, but most people I know who call themselves liberals don’t do any critical thinking at all, but simply parrot PC jargon. If you call yourself a liberal, in the first place, most people are going to assume you hate the very idea of race realism, and virtually all of them do. In like manner, if you call yourself a conservative, people are going to assume a lot of things about you that simply aren’t true. That’s why I call myself a “Nationalist Libertarian,” because though it’s suggestive of what I believe, it’s nonstandard enough that people react by asking me what I think, instead of assuming that they already know. In short, you need a new term to describe yourself, so people won’t make a knee-jerk judgment about you.
Also, transcendence is ambiguous. You can transcend the notion, say, that all Gypsies are thieves, and that’s a good thing. But then you can transcend the idea too far, and get the notion that the proportion of thieves among Gypsies is exactly the same as their proportion among all ethic groups, which is even more wrong than your original unexamined idea.

I think a ‘end of history’ line of argument implies that everyone must eventually either qualify as a conservative, simply thrive off change for it’s own sake, or desire change for less laudable reasons. Nothing inherently incorrect about saving effort, some people make it into quite the lifestyle! Judging by that graph you posted America might still have a lot of work left to do though.

Robert, here’s a pretty thoughtful conservative piece by Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute about the effect of welfare reform on single mothers during the current recession. It concludes that while some have gone to work, more have simply switched to other forms of welfare, like food stamps and rent subsidies.

It concludes with the moral hazard argument — none of the welfare reforms tackle the real question of why did you become a single parent, and did the availability of welfare help empower that decision. It seems a pretty good start for some thoughtful discussion about the intersection of liberalism with race realism, and presents a non-ignorant vision of conservative values.